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I am currently reading “Chaos Monkeys”, the story of a physics PhD graduate who worked for Goldman Sachs in New York, then founded a YC startup and sold it to twitter, before joining Facebook pre IPO as one of the handful product managers on the ads team. There is a lot to talk about in this book, but that’s for another post.

One of the surprising stories is that pre Facebook’s IPO, they were trying to increase revenues in any way possible, one idea was placing ads on the logout page, calling it the logout experience “LOX”. 

The growth team was against this, arguing it would threaten user growth, here is why.

In emerging markets at that time (2011), users didn’t own smartphones nor PCs, their way to access Facebook was to go to internet cafes, once they finish, they logout, leaving the PC with Facebook’s logout screen, the next user came, saw the page, and would sign up for Facebook, driving user growth.

Placing an ad on this page would threaten user growth by distracting those new entrants to the social media world. The two teams ended up agreeing to launch LOX for saturated Facebook markets such as the US, and not show it for yet to be blue (maximum Facebook penetration) countries such as Brazil and India.

I am not new to emerging market behaviors, I wrote earlier about Snapchat vs Instagram stories on slow internet connections, and more recently, one of the examples of developed markets taking decisions harming emerging ones is Uber’s recent redesign. 

Uber now forces users to put the destination address before requesting the ride. A country like Egypt has no addresses on the maps, no postal codes, and no building numbers. Add to this, people writing street names in different ways in Arabic (Mostafa vs Mustafa) results in different results, even with Uber using Google maps as the primary search database, even Google can’t map Egypt properly. 

This results in many problems, it is hard to request a ride without typing something so users end up writing the city name like San Francisco, when the driver starts the ride he/she is confused by the address on the app, and one specific problem a driver told me is something called “the golden trip”. Uber allows the driver to put a destination and the app would only send rides to the driver if the user’s destination is on the driver’s way (drivers use this ride when they are going home). With the current mess, multiple drivers told me they had to cancel rides after accepting them because they discover the address the user entered isn’t correct and they are going somewhere different from the driver’s destination.

As I am watching the Uber fiasco, I am reading “Chaos Monkeys”. In the book, the author lists the rules of Silicon Valley capitalism, one of them is “Success forgives all sins”.

I think this not only applies to silicon valley. It applies to many aspects in life. More generically “History is written by the victors”.

If you are against it and it succeeds, history is written by the victors, and success forgives all sins. If you don’t like it and it fails, you become the brilliant who saw it coming, the victor.

Many people asked me how I got into product management. If you read on the internet you will find countless stories of different people and how they got into the job. Because product management more of an art than science, these stories are very different, here is another one.

I got interested in product management because I like to think about building stuff, I also like working with others and motivate them to achieve a common goal. I didn’t know what I want to do (and still don’t know), and thought that product management is the closest thing at the moment to where I want to be (this will always change), so I decided to find a product management gig.

Again, since there are tons of long reads by different people and how they got there, I will just discuss the things you should read/do to help you get into product.

Read

I am big on books, I have an imposter syndrome where I think one can’t learn something without reading a book. The books I see most beneficial to product managers are

• Cracking the PM interview: This one is a must read. It nicely lists different types of careers in product management, the interview process at different companies, and many exercises for each step. You might think I should read this at the end, or when I am ready to interview, however I think you should start by it, because after reading it you will find out which skills you are good at, and what you need to learn to be ready for product management. Don’t skim it, I did this mistake when I first read it, and it costed me Google interview, the questions were almost identical to what’s in the book, and I wasn’t prepared enough. Also, Google interviews are the hardest I ever did, they made booking interviews seem like a piece of cake (although they are also hard), so make sure you master the book before applying to the big guys.
• Lean Analytics: I am allergic to anything with “lean” in it, they end up being a lengthy blog post stretched to fit 250 pages to satisfy the publisher’s requests. Lean analytics is an exception. It will give you a good mental model to think about metrics in product organization, it is also very beneficial to those worked in service business and want to move to product.
• Traction: It is easier to join a startup as the first product management job than to join a mature company, and a startup’s keyword is “growth”. This book explains the different acquisition channels, and gives you a framework to how to run experiments to define winning/losing strategies.
• Other than this, there are countless blog posts that I can’t list here, however a great source for the best in class product management tips from practitioners is twitter. Start by following Steven Sinofsky, Andrew Chen, Josh Elman, Hunter Walk, Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt, Ken Norton, and Chris Dixon. Once you follow those people, you will fall into the twitter blackhole of many other accounts to follow, since they will often retweet/interact with other smart folks.

Side Projects

Besides reading, getting hands on experience won’t come without shipping something. This is challenging for people who are not in a product environment, so building side projects is a great way to get some practical, hands on experience. It is better if you build these projects with others, because it shows you can influence and work with others towards a shared vision. They don’t have to be complex, or the next big thing, but they should be useful. You should have a story to back why you decided to build something, and it is even better if you have results to back this story.

Reading, and working on side projects will get you a jumpstart towards a product management career, some people achieve this faster than others, this is what worked for me.

Last Friday we had the first GoEuro hackathon, this was one of the ideas that were presented.

The search part in this demo is real and using the GoEuro search API. The booking part is for demo purpose.

Bonus: OK Google.

Two weeks ago we had a big incident at work. The incident triggered a series of events that resulted in a big loss. One of my colleagues organized a postmortem that was interesting. Here is  how he did it:

• Gather everyone involved with the incident in a room.
• What?
  • Give each person a few post it notes, ask them to write down the sequence of events from their point of view. Not the things they discovered after, and not things that didn’t happen to them
    • Good example: “On Monday at 10AM, I saw this alert.”
    • Bad Example: “The server stopped working at 8AM”. No one experienced the server not working, but someone experienced the alert.
  • Build a timeline. Collect each person’s notes and post them on the wall. If more than one person experienced the same event you can just use one of them.
• Why?
  • Root cause analysis: Now that you know what happened from people’s point of view, you need to understand what really happened.
    • Ask each person to write down the root cause they know for events from the timeline on the wall (e.g. There was a bug in X module that resulted in the server shutting down, hence triggering the alert).
    • Collect these root causes and stick them next to their respective events.
• Solution
  • For every root cause, discuss how this can be prevented in the future, whose responsibility to take care of it.
  • Some root causes will be unknown, needing further investigation. This is also a good time to discuss investigation tasks.

What I like about this method is it separates the technical reasons from the process reasons. Sometimes there is a small bug, but with the wrong process it takes long time to react, other times, something major happens, but because the process is right, people react to it quickly. Separating the process and the technical reasons during the analysis phase helps fixing both.

I finished Gibran’s “The prophet”. It is my first experience reading English poetry. It was a quick one hour read and I really enjoyed it. Here are some of my highlights…

The coming of the ship

Much have we loved you. But speechless was our love, and with veils has it been veiled.

Yet now it cries aloud unto you, and would stand revealed before you.

And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Giving

There are those who give little of the much which they have –and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.

And there are those who have little and give it all.

These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

Work

And what is it to work with love?

It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.

It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.

It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.

…

Work is love made visible.

And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better than you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.

And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.

And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Friendship

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill? Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Time

And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.

The farewell

Brief were my days among you, and briefer still the words I have spoken.

But should my voice fade in your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again,

And with a richer heart and lips more yielding to the spirit will I speak.

Yea, I shall return with the tide,

And though death may hide me, and the greater silence enfold me, yet again will I seek your understanding.

One thing organizations that do A/B testing have to agree on is how to treat inconclusive experiments. 

Inconclusive result means statistically you can neither say it is positive nor negative, and therefore instead of deriving conclusions on whether a feature is good or bad, one should analyze the goals and come up with the next hypothesis until it becomes conclusive or be regarded as failure and move to the next idea.

Sometimes I think A/B testing is like the stock market, you should be disciplined in your approach for your investments to yield the best results. There is an element of loss aversion, and fear of appearing as a failure. Discipline solves most of this.

Yesterday I met Mohamed Radwan at an Egyptian community Iftar in Berlin. We were chatting about the early days of twitter, when the Egyptian network was so small that we used to organize tweetups (twitter meetups). Many participants of this early twitter network became leading figures when the Egyptian uprising started in 2011.

This reminds me of “Egypt Influence Network”. Right after toppling Mubarak in 2011, Kovas Boguta, a data scientist – who appears to be currently working for twitter – created a visualization of the most influential accounts on twitter during #Jan25 (the main hashtag of the revolution).

The author’s website is no longer working. Luckily I have a copy. There are 750 twitter handles on this image. I have a tiny node at the bottom right. There is also a pdf version where you can do text search.

Whatever memories this might trigger, it is part of my life I will never forget. I will always be grateful that it happened, and for the lessons it taught me.

I finished the book Mastery by Robert Greene. It studies the lives of different successful people (masters), and abstracts what makes them so by going through specific phases that the author defines as the road to mastery.

While some parts are very true, like the part where he describes how naïve one is when entering the workforce, the importance of the apprenticeship phase and committing to objectives for long time (which is confirmed in many other places like Grit, and Outliers…etc), and the final step where masters put their own touch over what they learned during the apprenticeship phase to become masters themselves.

What I didn’t like is the book is very long. It can be summarized in less than 100 pages. The most annoying part for me was how the author narrates the details of the stories of these historical figures as if he was there. He keeps describing how they felt and what they said to themselves. Most of these figures have no written biographies and most of the details are from the author’s imagination.

I was talking about this with Shreef, he said he considers Greene’s stories as fiction. He looks at the stories as a way to explain the concepts on real scenarios. This sounds like a fair point. Maybe I took the author literally.

Here is a part from the book about entering the work force:

In childhood we are inculcated in culture through a long period of dependency — far longer than any other animal. During this period we learn language, writing, math, and reasoning skills, along with a few others. Much of this happens under the watchful and loving guidance of parents and teachers. As we get older, greater emphasis is placed on book learning — absorbing as much information as possible about various subjects. Such knowledge of history, science, or literature is abstract, and the process of learning largely involves passive absorption. At the end of this process (usually somewhere between the ages of 18 and 25) we are then thrust into the cold, harsh work world to fend for ourselves.

When we emerge from the youthful state of dependency, we are not really ready to handle the transition to an entirely independent phase. We carry with us the habit of learning from books or teachers, which is largely unsuited for the practical, self-directed phase of life that comes next. We tend to be somewhat socially naïve and unprepared for the political games people play. Still uncertain as to our identity, we think that what matters in the work world is gaining attention and making friends. And these misconceptions and naïveté are brutally exposed in the light of the real world.

If we adjust over time, we might eventually find our way; but if we make too many mistakes, we create endless problems for ourselves. We spend too much time entangled in emotional issues, and we never quite have enough detachment to reflect and learn from our experiences. The apprenticeship, by its very nature, must be conducted by each individual in his or her own way. To follow precisely the lead of others or advice from a book is self-defeating. This is the phase in life in which we finally declare our independence and establish who we are. But for this second education in our lives, so critical to our future success, there are some powerful and essential lessons that we all can benefit from, that can guide us away from common mistakes and save us valuable time.

These lessons transcend all fields and historical periods because they are connected to something essential about human psychology and how the brain itself functions. They can be distilled into one overarching principle for the Apprenticeship Phase, and a process that loosely follows three steps.

The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character — the first transformation on the way to mastery. You enter a career as an outsider. You are naïve and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is full of dreams and fantasies about the future. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities, and limited experience. Slowly, you will ground yourself in reality, in the objective world represented by the knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process you will transform yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. In the end, you will master yourself and all of your weaknesses.

This has a simple consequence: you must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning. Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity, and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come — far more than the paltry increase in pay you might receive at some seemingly lucrative position that offers fewer learning opportunities. This means that you move toward challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. You do not choose apprenticeships that seem easy and comfortable.

Yesterday there was almost an elevators apocalypse in Berlin. I wanted to take the U6 from Oranienburgertor and the elevator was broken. 

I opened Google maps and found an alternative. Walk 5 minutes, take the S25 from Oranienburgerstr. I walked, arrived, broken elevator. 

By this time I lost hope and decided to go home. I walked to Hackechermarkt, took the elevator, then S to Fredrichestr. I had to switch again to take the U6, broken elevator.

S again towards Alexanderplatz, had to switch multiple times until I got home.

This day reminds me of similar days in Cairo. When the traffic is so bad that no cab driver agree to pick me up (in Egypt the cab driver has to accept your destination before you get in the car, and in case you are thinking, public transportation isn’t wheelchair accessible). Some days ended up well, like the day a driver picked me up and when we arrived he didn’t take the money. He said he was on his way home and he wasn’t out for work! Other days I had to wait for hours or having to call someone to pick me up. 

Then Uber came. I no longer have to have someone go with me to stop a cab, and I no longer have to be at the mercy of drivers mood and where they want to go. Uber put an order to the chaos I used to live in.

Yesterday was like my Egyptian days, maybe this time before autonomous cars come and I no longer have to take elevators. 

These days are reminders to why I am grateful and excited for technology. Many years ago someone couldn’t go up to their home until elevators were invented. Today I couldn’t take the elevator to the train, in a near future this will no longer be a problem. Thanks to technology, and software eating the world.